


Bandaids

by Horribibble



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: De-Aged Stiles, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:40:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Horribibble/pseuds/Horribibble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>None of them are certain how it happened. None of them are certain how to change him back. None of them are certain how to break the news. </p>
<p>So Derek takes care of the little hurts, and puts the pieces together over time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bandaids

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starshipsandsuperheroes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starshipsandsuperheroes/gifts).



> This started out as a prompt from Starshipsandsuperheroes for a de-aged!Stiles fic. It has since become overdue as fuck. I hope you like it. ^^;

Apparently, Stiles taught himself to cook around his eighth birthday.

At first, Derek isn’t exactly sure he wants to know the story behind the bandages covering all of the boy’s fingers. Some of them have characters on them, and some of them don’t.

Regardless, they fill Derek with the inexplicable desire to kiss each little hurt better, to bury his lips in the soft creases of Stiles’s palm.

The boy—and he really _is_ a boy now, at least until Deaton and Lydia puzzle out a way to return him to normal—is even more frail than he seemed as a lanky teenager. He was right about his wit being his armor. At eight years old, before he developed the acerbic wit and the pointed tongue, he was just a small, scared little boy.

Derek doesn’t even know what it is, at first, but he puts the pieces together over time.

 

* * *

 

Stiles was still just as curious, still just as prone to eavesdropping and peeking around walls, he just tended to spend a lot more time on his tiptoes, these days. It reminded Derek of the days before Paige, before the fire.

He remembers coming home, bouncing his basketball on the hardwood floors until his mother called for him to cut it out or _so help you, Derek Arthur Hale._ He remembers rolling his eyes and shuffling into the kitchen, where Cora and Ian would try their hardest to rise up enough on their toes to see what their big brother was doing.

He remembers the way they’d whine when they couldn’t quite manage it. The way they turned big, wet eyes up to him until he pillaged the cookie jar for them.

With Stiles, it’s worse.

He’ll rise up in his too-big converse, the toes squeaking on the kitchen floor until his legs start to shake. Eventually, he’ll realize that it’s pointless; he can’t manage it on his own. The first time, he starts to say, “Mama”, but then he shuts his mouth. He drops down to the flats of his feet and fidgets with the hem of his shirt and says, “Oh.”

And then Derek picks him up and puts him on the counter.

Stiles kicks his feet lazily, not hard enough to damage the counter, but enough to dispel nervous energy. He can never seem to keep himself still, and Derek has slowly become accustomed to it.

He’d probably get nervous if there wasn’t some fidgeting going on at any given moment.

It doesn’t hurt anything.

Stiles watches him with massive brown eyes as he fixes some meager offerings for their dinner.

He says, with a lisping sort of morality particular to a well-meaning eight-year-old, “You don’t have any vegetables.”

“I thought kids hated vegetables.”

“I’m not a kid!” Stiles pouted before puffing up his cheeks in ‘righteous’ indignation.

“You know, eventually you’ll pass out, and then you’ll start breathing again all on your own.”

Peter had said that to them every time one of his numerous nieces and nephews attempted such devious tactics. There tended to be a lot of foot stamping and whining afterwards, but Stiles just expels the breath and rubs at his arm.

If the flannel shirts were big on him before, they’re clownishly outsized now. The color of it makes him looked washed out, not at all helping the glum look on his face.

“I read about nutrition,” Stiles says, “Mama says it’s important. I promised I’d take care of Daddy, but he’s a big baby about vegetables.”

Derek looks in the pantry, which Boyd and Isaac had tried to stock while Erica had bitched incessantly that he _wouldn’t eat any of it jeez does anybody listen?_

And she’d been right, of course.

He doesn’t think that pickled beets are the kind of vegetables that Stiles had in mind, and he can’t begin to understand who had nominated that one as a great pick, out of all of the other items in the canned food aisle.

He turns to look at Stiles, trying amiably at making his loose shoelaces do figure eights in the air.

He waits until Stiles looks back at him to say, “We’ll go grocery shopping tomorrow.”

 

* * *

 

Once provided with a stool and a Chef’s Little Helper apron—a touch that did not quite seem to please him, judging by the pout on his lips, but which suited Lydia and Allison and their camera phones just fine—Stiles was actually a pretty big help around the kitchen.

As he carefully poured the hot oil out of the pan and into the container in the sink, a job that Derek really would have preferred to be in charge of, Stiles explained, “It’s okay. Really. How d’you think I got all _these_?”

He waggles the bandaid-riddled fingers, and Derek arches a brow at him. “A shining endorsement of your safety habits.”

“Well, my mom says that when you get hurt, your body learns a lesson, and sometimes it leaves marks. Like Post-It notes, but they hurt. Next time you try, your body remembers, and you don’t make stupid mistakes.”

“I see.” Derek says.

And Stiles rolls his eyes, planting his chubby little hands on his hips, “Of _course_ you see, dummy. I _showed_ you.”

Absently, Derek watches as Stiles continues busying himself about the kitchen.

He wonders where all the baby fat went.

 

* * *

 

Stiles asks, eventually, why they won’t take him home.

His dad knows about the werewolf thing, they say, but he doesn’t understand why he can’t go home. His dad needs him—he has to need him, Stiles says.

To him, the idea of his father taking care of himself is unthinkable.

But they don’t want him to find out. They think that they can keep him from the hurt he felt all those years ago. They think they can keep the raw, gaping hole of Mother from opening up his insides again.

But Stiles has always been smart.

He sits next to Derek on the couch on pack movie night, and burrows into his side. He whispers, “She doesn’t make it.”

And it takes Derek a while to realize that he isn’t talking about the B-Movie that the betas argued over for a solid hour before deciding it was too damn stupid to really scare the eight-year-old in their midst.

When he does, it’s like a delayed punch to the gut.

He hesitates.

He says, ‘Er’ and ‘Um’, instead of his usual growling and pointed silence.

“I know how to use a computer.” Stiles mumbles, “It’s not like it was hard.”

And Derek wraps his arm tight around him and curses Peter for leaving his laptop out where Stiles could get it. He should have known better. He probably _did_ know better, judging by the looks he’s throwing them.

Like he’s been waiting for this. Like he’s satisfied.

He’s been saying all along that they needed to tell him. That it wasn’t right to just keep the kid here in limbo, thinking that everything was A-Okay, just a small magical fuck-up and then _back to the future._

Stiles looks at the band-aids coiling around his fingers and says, “Do I ever stop getting hurt?”

“Not really.” Derek says.

“Then who kisses it better?”

The answer is too complicated for any of them to attempt.

Scott turns off the movie, and the rest of the pack leaves for home.

Peter stops on his way out to touch the kid’s hair, and Derek thinks for a second that he actually feels sympathy for the little boy. It’s a strange feeling.

Peter shushes him when he whines, and glances at his nephew. “Derek can help you,” He says, “Derek will take your pain.”

Stiles looks up at him, eyes wet and plaintive, “But then _he’s_ stuck with it.”

And Peter watches him, a certain curious light in his eyes. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

He leaves before Derek can ask him what the hell he’s talking about.

 

* * *

  

That night, Stiles sleeps with Derek, curled under his arm, his head padded against the alpha’s pectoral muscle. Derek can’t imagine it being too comfortable.

Then again, Stiles sleeps in starts and stops, and in the middle of the night, Derek realizes that Stiles isn’t so much sleeping as _staring at him intently_ in the dark. He reaches out and squishes the tip of Stiles’s turned-up nose, something he’s wanted to do for the past week or so.

Stiles doesn’t move.

“Hey, Derek?”

“Yeah, Stiles?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For making it feel better. It must have hurt a lot.”

“I haven’t—”

Stiles’s eyes are wide and innocent in the darkness, and Derek can’t help but soak in the quiet adoration, the open peace in those big brown eyes.

“It’s no problem.”

Stiles grins, tightening his grip on Derek’s warm skin. He says, “Hey. I’ll take your pain, too, okay? When I’m big again.”

Derek rubs his thumb against the fabric of Stiles’s too-big sleep shirt. He rumbles, “You always do.”

 

* * *

 

When Derek wakes up tangled in the arms of a full-grown Stiles Stilinski in a decidedly too-short sleep shirt, he can’t manage the energy to panic.

Instead, he blinks into those pretty brown eyes and watches as they blink slowly back.

“So that was pretty new.” Stiles says, voice sleep-rough and nervous.

Derek reaches down to grasp a band-aid free hand and sets to kissing each and every delicate finger. Over the course of what may well be hours, he moves on to the thin skin of his eyelids, his forehead, and the softness of his lips, taking his sweet time.

He whispers, “Where does it hurt?”

And Stiles shivers. “ _Everywhere_.”

He sinks into Stiles, kissing and smoothing and spreading himself lazily into the singed and bruised spaces, the spider silk-thin scar tissue.

Eventually, Stiles begins to fidget, has to move. He rolls them so that Derek is looking up at him as he straddles his hips.

His movements have never been so sure. 

**Author's Note:**

> Is it weird that I always seem to write Derek with a different middle name, but that they've all begun with 'A'?   
> Oo


End file.
